SpinRite Data Recovery Software

SpinRite is a magnetic mass storage data recovery and maintenance utility. SpinRite can prevent and predict drive problems. And when hard drive crashes SpinRite can perform extensive data recovery. This is one of the strongest points of SpinRite.

The first thing you will notice is the size of the executable file. SpinRite has no classical installation utility, only one exe file that runs under Windows or DOS. This small utility has everything needed to create a bootable disk and to examine hard drive from all possible aspects.

SpinRite supports all kinds of hard drives and all types of file systems. The boot drive it creates contains also FreeDOS as operating system which SpinRite uses to operate. It needs PC to run but can analyze, check, repair and recover data from any hard drive connected to this PC. SpinRite is written in assembly language. This is the secret of small program size and together with direct hardware communication it is also the reason for extremely fast operation.

Among many features supported by SpinRite is also SMART–a collection of disk's statuses that can provide information about various error counters and other important data like disk temperature. But this is only one source of data SpinRite uses to determine the health of any hard disk. SpinRite uses unique method to check data surface of every sector for possible defects. If the data can not be reliably written then this sector will be remapped to avoid any problems. And if there is a problem with reading SpinRite will read it again and again until it either reads without error or has enough data to try advanced data recovery by analyzing the data read.

Preventing Disk Crashes

By running SpinRite periodically you can actually prevent disk crashes. SpinRite checks data surface of disk platters with periodic reads and writes. This way it discovers weak areas and maps them out. Bad sectors will not be used for files and chances for disk crash will be minimized.

Predicting Disk Failure

By checking the data area of a disk SpinRite can spot problematic locations. If the number of bad locations increases then this is a strong signal that the disk will soon fail. This is a good moment to back up the data.

SpinRite Data Recovery

This is the strongest part of the software. SpinRite uses unique approach to recover the data from the drive. It first disables automatic relocation of bad sectors and reads each sector many times. It will try to get one reading without error and if this fails it will then analyze previous readings with errors and try to statistically determine correct data by proprietary Dynastat data recovery system. With this unique algorithm SpinRite data recovery is automated and you can be assured that no software can do more.

How To Use SpinRite

You can either boot PC from a disk created by SpinRite (it can be floppy disk, USB flash disk or any other disk from which you can boot your computer) or directly from the hard drive if you boot PC to MS-DOS command line mode. SpinRite runs in text mode and after you set few initial parameters you can choose one of the available modes:

Graphic Status Display

Real Time Activities

Detailed Technical Log

Surface Analysis Monitor

Dynastat Data Recovery

Conclusion

SpinRite is definitely a great disk maintenance and data recovery software. If you will use it regularly it will prevent or at least predict hard drive failure. And if a hard drive fails SpinRite will try every possible trick to get the data back.

SpinRite is a commercial data recovery software. Its MSRP is listed as $89.00.